Paper accounts on Interactive Brokers

A paper trading account at Interactive Brokers is a fully-simulated copy of the live trading environment. You can place orders, hold positions, see market data (delayed by default), and watch P&L move — but no real money or shares change hands. Paper accounts are the only safe place to develop and test code that talks to the IBKR Web API, and the recommended first connection to wire into this gateway.

IBKR Gateway recommends that your first connection point at a paper username. Live accounts have additional prerequisites (the Authenticator App for unattended re-auth) and any mistake there moves real money.

What you get

USD 1,000,000 of simulated cash, refreshed automatically at the start of each month if your balance has drifted away from it.
Full access to the IBKR Client Portal Web API — every endpoint a live account uses (/portfolio, /iserver/account/orders, /iserver/marketdata/snapshot, etc.).
Delayed market data on most US equities, options, and futures out of the box. Real-time subscriptions on a paper account are mirrored from your live account's subscriptions.
A separate username and account ID (e.g. wawpkp283 / DUQ443672); your live login does not grant paper access.

What you don't get

Real-time market data unless your live account has the subscriptions enabled. Without them, snapshot prices may show as blank — historical bars from /iserver/marketdata/history still work and so do day/week/month/year change calculations.
Fills that exactly reflect live liquidity. The paper engine assumes ample size at the displayed price; thinly-traded symbols can fill in paper but not in reality.
Most fees and margin interest (the simulation models a simplified version).

How to enable a paper account on IBKR

Have a live IBKR account that has been approved and funded. Paper trading is not offered standalone — IBKR requires an active brokerage relationship first. If your live application is still in any pending state, finish that first.

Log into Client Portal at interactivebrokers.com with your live credentials.

Top-right menu (head & shoulders icon) → Settings. In the search box on the left, type paper.

Click Paper Trading Account under "Account Configuration". On the next screen, click Yes next to "Would you like a Paper Trading Account?". Accept the terms and submit.

IBKR shows a confirmation page with your new paper username (e.g. wawpkp283) and paper account ID (e.g. DUQ443672). Write these down — you will not see the username again in the live portal and IBKR will not email it to you.

The paper username is independent of your live login. IBKR generates a random one (you don't get to pick it). The first password is the same as your live password at the moment of creation, but the two are decoupled afterwards — changing one does not change the other. We strongly recommend setting a unique password on the paper account once it's active.

The approval wait

The screen you see right after submitting reads roughly:

Your Paper Trading Account application has been submitted, and if received by 4 PM (Eastern Time) on any normal business day will be processed by the next business day under normal circumstances (provided your normal trading account is approved and funded).

In practice the timing is one of:

Same business day, a few hours — typical when you submit before noon ET on a US trading day. Paper accounts usually flip from pending to active somewhere between 1 and 4 hours after submission.
Next business day — when you submit after 4 PM ET, on a Friday evening, weekend, or US holiday.
Longer (24–72 hours) — if your live account application is still in any "in review" state. The paper approval cannot complete until the live application is final.

There is no notification email. You re-check by trying to log in with the paper username — you'll either land in the portal or see the "application in progress" page until it flips.

How to tell it's active

Two signals work, in order of reliability:

On the IBKR Client Portal, flip the Live/Paper toggle to Paper and log in with the paper username. If you land on the portal dashboard (showing $1,000,000 USD in cash), the account is active.
Via this CLI, see the section below — a successful sign-in that shows "brokerage: authenticated=true connected=true" and a non-empty cash ledger means you're in.

Once active, the paper account never expires while your live account remains in good standing. You only need to enable it once.

Using your paper account with this gateway

From the CLI

Run node cli/ibkr.js and pick paper:

── Sign in ──
Mode [paper/live] (default 'live'): paper
Username: your paper username
Password: ********
Open browser visibly (debugging only)? [y/N]
  · launching chromium…
✓ signed in as wawpkp283 (mode=paper)
  brokerage: authenticated=true connected=true

No 2FA, no Authenticator-App secret — paper accounts can't have either. State is persisted to ~/.ibkr-cli/session.json so subsequent runs just say "Existing session — reuse? [Y/n]" and go straight to the menu.

From the web console

Sign in to the console with your Google account. Create a new connection, choose mode Paper, and enter the paper username + password. The web service handles re-auth automatically (paper sessions are simpler than live — there's nothing to maintain beyond the cookies).

Once the connection is created, the gateway issues you a per-connection bearer key. Calls to /v1/api/* on the gateway are proxied straight to your paper IBKR session.

Last verified against IBKR's portal in May 2026. If the menu has shifted, the canonical URL for the enable form is interactivebrokers.com/sso/Login?action=PAPER_TRADER.